Money in The General Theory: The Contributions of Jan Kregel

When I was a student at Washington University, Hyman P. Minsky handed to me a 1984 draft paper by Jan Kregel titled ‘Reading Copy. The Multiplier and Liquidity Preference: Two Sides of the Theory of Effective Demand’ — which would later be published in a 1988 volume edited by Alain Barrere. It was the first time I had been exposed to a serious exposition of Keynes’ own rates analysis. By coincidence, an office mate was preparing to leave for his first position and he happened to have a copy of Kregel’s The Reconstruction of Political Economy (Kregel 1973) that he gifted to me. I then pursued Kregel’s earlier books that detailed the Cambridge approach to capital and profit. By that time, I had been at Washington University for two years and had absorbed what I thought was enough of Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis as well as of the neoclassical economics that was the mainstay of the PhD program. Before coming to Washington University, I had been most interested in Marxist economics and Institutionalism. I was ready for a change. I dove into the Cambridge surplus approach.